United States

Peder Anker, in From Bauhaus to Ecohouse, continues his iconoclastic style of environmental and intellectual history.[1] In this book he shifts his focus from ecology to ecological design. Anker is quick to point out that despite ecological design’s recent popularity and its 1960s pedigree, its intellectual foundations stretch back to the 1920s and, in fact, began with that paragon of modernist design, the Bauhaus.

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“Why, we cut down a woods in a few days!  you have no idea what damage an army can do - it is worse than seven year locusts,” wrote Private. John L.

From October 1974 to December 1975, George H.W.

The history of religion in colonial British America has been told using a variety of narratives, as a declension from pious beginnings or as the Christianization of mostly pagan common folk. But the story has consistently been geographically centered in the colonies themselves, with an occasional look to the European past for context.  Carla Gardina Pestana’s new synthesis, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World, sets religion in the British colonies in its proper context: the Atlantic.

David C. Carter’s first published monograph, The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965-1968, intricately details what he considers a neglected story of the shifting and often discordant interactions between the Johnson White House and grassroots civil rights leaders. On June 4, 1965, in an address to the students and faculty of Howard University, President Johnson boldly evoked his administration’s dedication to afford black Americans not only equal opportunity but equal results.

Historians have recently begun to rethink and re-evaluate the wartime and presidential career of Ulysses S. Grant.  Joan Waugh’s U.S.

Americans imagine the Civil War as an event dominated by great campaigning armies, gallant charges, principled generals, and an honorable finale. Of course these were important elements to the conflict, yet, as Daniel E. Sutherland points out, they were also only part of the story.  A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War convincingly demonstrates that the war was riddled with an ugly underside, characterized by unconventional combat, murder, thievery, pillaging, and smaller wars that functioned within the larger national conflict.

“A More Contentious Order of Things”:
The End of the Cold War and the Trans-Atlantic Search for Stability

Harold Mock
University of Virginia

Sarah Pearsall’s recent work, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century, provides another addition to the growing body of literature dedicated to the Atlantic World. Pearsall’s work, however, should not be circumscribed to just one section of historiography. While Pearsall certainly concentrates on the dynamics of the Anglo-Atlantic World, her work also encompasses the history of the British Empire, the history of family life, and the hidden history of emotion as manifested through letter writing.

This important sociological study explores the much overlooked and largely misconstrued analysis of the transnational migration of African women to economically advanced nations. John Arthur draws attention to the experiences of West African migrant women in the United States by unraveling the complex social, economic, and cultural processes by which these women negotiate new identities and construct meanings from their migratory experiences.